The self-publishing industry is booming thanks to the internet and the proliferation of e-readers.

Amanda Hocking’s stories about witches and vampires falling in love may be changing the face of publishing.

The college dropout from Austin, Minn, had no connection to other writers or the publishing industry when she resorted to self-publishing just over a year ago after rejections from many publishers.

First the Muppets fan just posted her books for anyone to read, then she started selling them, at low prices of 99 cents to $2.99. By late last year she was in Kindle’s million-seller e-book club along with Stieg Larsson and Janet Evanovich.

The 28-year-old signed a $1 million deal with St. Martin’s Press and is currently on a European tour promoting her books. There’s a movie option on her Trylle Trilogy and a comic book is in the works.

Has the paranormal romance writer written a new chapter in publishing?

British businessman Nicholas Read studied Hocking’s winning formula and decided he’d also make his own publishing success. His book Endworlds: Echoes of Worlds Past is sold in three instalments for $7 each. Launched in December on many e-book sites, including Kindle and iTunes, the science fiction series has more than 49,000 fans on Facebook.

Sales figures won’t be known until the first quarter report, but Read “couldn’t be happier. The bloggers and social media response has been great,” he said in an interview.

“We struck the chord we were hoping to strike.”

Read, who formed Read Publishing to handle the online enterprise, says talks have begun with a print publisher.

The editing, printing, distribution, publicity and other skills print publishers provide are still extremely valuable, says Geoffrey Taylor, director of Authors at Harbourfront Centre and the International Festival of Authors.

E-books are still relatively new on the scene, he says, adding that “five years ago it was a fringe thing; now every publisher has e-books.” Most publishers, though, sell only works that have already been published online.

The publishing world is full of stories of wonderful books that had trouble getting published — J.K. Rowling had a hard time getting anyone to take on Harry Potter — and Taylor can see why frustrated authors turn to e-publishing.

It’s cheaper and accessible to more people, whether or not they can write, like a “YouTube for books.”

As for Hocking’s success, Taylor calls it a “Cinderella” story. “It’s quite miraculous.

“This is not the death of publishing, it is a whole new chapter,” he adds. “There is not just one example of how to do it.”

Cheerleading magazine editor Brittany Geragotelis (brittanythebookslayer.blogspot.com) may be another Hocking. She gave away her writing online, chapter by chapter, before self-publishing Life’s a Witch. She published both online and in paperback at the insistence of her millions of social media readers who wanted to give friends a copy of the book.

Given wide exposure on WATTPAD — a Toronto social media site for book lovers and authors that just won an award for Best Canadian Startup of 2011 — Geragotelis’s paranormal drama has attracted offers from publishers as well as movie and TV producers.

In this way, self-published ebooks are like a “minor league” from which publishers pick their future writers.

Kim McArthur, president of McArthur and Associates Publishing, says ebooks will probably settle at 15 per cent of the business.

Although she admits to being “totally biased,” McArthur says many self-published e-books are poorly written.

Print publishing allows extensive copy editing and “still there are mistakes caught by vigilant readers,” she said. What about the book just “thrown online,” she wonders. Who’s making sure they’re not riddled with errors or even plagiarized?

Sarah MacLachlan, president of House of Anansi Press, echoes that.

“There’s no quality, policing and control,” she says, adding that paper and binding cover only 10 per cent of the cost of a book: the rest is editing, marketing and “more than spellcheck.”

McArthur has published only one e-book that wasn’t first published on paper, Gordon Ferris’s The Hanging Shed, which sold 150,000 e-copies. However, he was already a well-established author.

McArthur says Hocking “hit pay dirt. I’m all for it. But she is the exception.”

MacLachlan also applauds Hocking’s success, saying, “She was just completely dedicated to making her books. It’s quite an exceptional story.”

But not one she expects to see replicated often.

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